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While most Queen’s students are sitting by roaring fires, roasting chestnuts and drinking eggnog over their holiday break, Drew Metcalfe (Artsci’15) is going to be locked in a battle of wits with some of the world’s top chess talent. Mr. Metcalfe and three other members of the have been invited to the University of Groningen in the Netherlands to take part in the school’s 52nd annual Chess Festival.

For the 400th anniversary of Groningen’s founding, they’ve sent invitations to their partner institutions around the world to come take part in the competition. Queen’s is an exchange partner of Groningen, and so students were invited to participate. The university will be covering the accommodation costs and fees for the visiting participants, leaving transportation costs to the students.

Since its inception in 1952, the Groningen Chess Festival has slowly grown in renown. It has served to launch the careers of a number of prominent chess players and is an event where players are able to acquire the titles of chess master or grandmaster, chess’ highest title next to world champion. This year’s competition will be filled with heavyweights in the world of chess — when participants aren’t pawndering moves in games of their own, they’ll be able to watch staged matches between players with global calibre talent.

To help cover the costs of travel, Mr. Metcalfe and his clubmates have applied for a number of Queen’s grants, receiving $1,400 from the Residence Society’s First Year Experience Fund. They were also the lucky recipients of funding from the (CMA), a Canadian non-profit organization that works to bring chess into schools across the country.

“It’s been really great to see the support we’ve been getting,” says Mr. Metcalfe, who’s been chess club president since 2013. Each summer the chess club helps the CMA host a tournament at Queen’s for local schoolchildren, and three of the four club members going to Groningen took part in CMA when they were younger. “We’re thrilled that CMA was able to help out.”

Mr. Metcalfe is hoping the trip to the Netherlands helps get more students interested in chess and have more come out to the club. When many of the chess club’s members graduated a few years ago, they were caught between a rook and a hard place, and have slowly regained members since then. “We’re working to build back up our participation levels and the trip to Groningen has really spurred people’s interest,” he says. “It’s amazing to see the opportunities that arise out of connections I didn’t even know about.”